No one really knows why he did this. He claimed that if we didn’t have them that we would be the laughing stock of Europe, which seems a little off beam as most other countries don’t have them either. But then logic was never Ahern’s strong point. He maintained that for people to vote using a pen and ballot paper was old hat and he wanted to brag to all his pals in Brussels that we were a high-tech country. Now the wish to brag sounds a lot more like Ahern. The little shit always did like the limelight.

What Ahern failed to realise is that the old system works. Pens don’t get viruses and rarely break down. They are pretty much fool proof.

The new voting machines were a different kettle of maggots altogether. They were flaky. They were unreliable. Worst of all, they were wide open to tampering. In short, they were the last thing people wanted to use when dealing with a totally corrupt system like our gubmint.

So for the last ten years all 7,000 machines have been sitting around cluttering up the place in various storage depots.

Our current gubmint has decided to dump the machines as the storage fees are mounting. They now have to find a way of dumping them.

It is a cost saving measure. You know how long it took to change paper ballots so that the “right” candidate won the vote? They went through thousands of erasers alone. Now with computer voting the incorrect votes can be changed quickly and efficiently. Of course in the future, once we have done away with the court system, we will get our friends in the media to announce the winner before the election. That will save even more money.

I just heard The EBS staff are going to have another one day strike. Fucking gobshites. My Salary and Pension have been cut to shit like everyone else, and they are looking for a retrospective bonus payment. Cunts. I’m going to give up watching the news.

Same thing was tried over here in a few states with similar results. Much easier to get a group of volunteers to go through and muck with the ballots. All they have to do then is feed ’em take out pizza and soda.

Not Green – No fucking way! I want my NO to be firm, loud and tamperproof.

Slab – Not a bad idea. Someone has seriously suggested that pubs might like to buy them. Are there many pubs left open after the smoking ban?

JOS – And to save us money he can bring them down on the back of his bike.

Jim C – The reasons given at the time were pathetic. It was mainly a case of trying to be seen in Europe as an “advanced” country. In other words, it was a status project. The only reasonable excuse was that it would speed up the results. So fucking what? The count is the only enjoyable part of an election!

Slab – I remember at the time the argument was put forward that the machines should have a “Spoil Vote” button. It’s a valid point. A spoiled vote is as legitimate as any other, as it is stating an opinion. And welcome to the Newsless society!

Kirk M – They did indeed run on Windows. It was either Windows 95 or 98 [can’t remember which] which was one of the huge arguments against the machines. I mean to say.. for fuck’s sake… Windows? And they swore they would be reliable? Hahahahaha!

Fucking brilliant. Only in Ireland could they spend 55million euros on voting machines that no-one wanted while the electoral roll is officially on the Oireachtas record as being possibly incorrect by up to 40% of the entries on it.
This subject was raised in 2007 and the government answer was that no corrective action was envisaged until at least 2012.
Basically some FF’er got a backhander brown envelope off the procurement contract and another one got a contract for storing them at blistering expense for a few years. Can they be converted to guillotines?

The voting machines story is even worse than that. I heard the Dutch guy who sold these pups to the Gummnit on the radio with the plank one morning, and he clearly stated that they were powered by the “Motorola 68030” processor (the voting machines not the politicians). As I am over 100 years of age now, I can remember when these plucky processors first went into PC’s. It was 1987/88 when Apple first began deploying the 68030’s in the Mac SE30, Iicx & Iici models. I clearly remember it because it was quickly overshadowed by the invention of the wheel. PC fans would have been buying their kit, powered by the 86030’s from Intel at about the same time. This means when our thick shits bought this junk from the flying Dutchman, it was already over ten years old, or obsolete as we used to kid in the confuser industry. In raw computing terms, they couldn’t have pushed a pebble downhill. Mind you, all they would have been asked to do is present you with a short list of gormless fuckers and wait until you actually ticked a box by mistake.